The Customer Sieve

We've learned that using a web site is a progressive process. Each user transitions
from one stage to the next, as they work to accomplish their goal.

The most pronounced transitions we've seen are on e-commerce sites. When we
watch shoppers focusing on buying a product, we can clearly see each stage
and when the transitions fail or succeed. By understanding the stages and how
they work, we can learn a lot about building better sites.

The stages act as a sieve: each stage inadvertently filtering shoppers out
before they reach the next stage. By focusing on this filtering, we can see
more users accomplish their goals.

To really see the sieve clearly, we study those shoppers who are completely
intent on buying a product. They know what product they want, the web site
has it, and they are ready to purchase.

Theoretically, every one of these shoppers should end up making a purchase.
However, in our studies, sites frequently prevent these shoppers from completing
transactions. By looking closely at the sieve, we can see where things are
going wrong and get clues on what to fix.

The sieve can be divided into six stages:

The Home Page Stage

The Location Stage

The Product List Stage

The Product Evaluation Stage

The Checkout Stage

The Receipt and Acceptance Stage

[We should note that, while these stages are all specific to e-commerce sites,
there are equivalent stages on other types of sites.]

Let's look at each stage:

1) The Home Page Stage

When a purchase-ready customer comes to a home page, the goal of that page
is to get them to the product they desire. And in our studies, the home page
typically does a good job at this.

Users who know what they want are typically faced with three choices on an
e-commerce home page: (a) use the search engine, (b) choose one of the featured
products, or (c) use the list of categories.

The very few people who choose (b) in our study go straight to the Product
Evaluation Stage. We see only 1 in 237 home page visits result in a purchase
this way.

Everyone else either uses search or the categories and progresses on to the
Location Stage. For almost all of our purchase-ready shoppers, the home page
does it's job quickly and efficiently.

2) The Location Stage

In this stage, the user either uses search or categories. Occasionally, they'll
bounce between the two.

We group search and categories together because, from a behavioral perspective,
they are essentially the same. In both cases, the user is trying to get to
a list of products to choose from.

We've found that 9% of the users stop at this stage. If 100 users started
the process, only 91 will continue from this stage.

When users can't identify the right category, they'll often go into search.
When search returns a "No Results", they are stuck. (Users rarely try multiple
searches. As we described in our article, Users
Don't Learn to Search Better, multiple searches don't help.)

3) The Product List Stage

Shoppers who successfully transition from the Location Stage end up here.
The activity for the user changes substantially at this point. The user is
faced with a list of products for which they need to isolate the one they are
most interested in.

About 8% of the users stop at this stage, failing to move forward and make
a purchase. Of the 91 users who made it this far, only 83 will continue on.

It is here that we see the behavior we call Pogosticking. Pogosticking is
when the user repeatedly visits a product description page, then hits the back
button to return to the list.

The more pogosticking we see in a clickstream, the less likely that user will
buy a product from that site. So, the best sites prevent pogosticking by providing
as much information as they can in the product list.

Some users will end up going back to the Location Stage because none of the
products displayed are what they want. These users are significantly less likely
to end up purchasing anything than those users who move onto the Product Evaluation
Stage. And many users give up at this stage.

4) The Product Evaluation Stage

This is the place where we see the most filtering of our users  a whopping
25% stop here. Only 58 will continue after this stage.

While some of them stop because none of the products they evaluate fit their
needs, most stop because they can't tell if the products are good enough.

Often, there isn't enough information or the right information isn't
present. After observing hundreds of shopping expeditions, we've found people
want to know lots of different things.

In clothing, for example, the fabric used is important. Is it cotton or a
blend? We've had users who wanted to know the thread count for sheets.

Pictures play a big role here. Our initial analysis of some recent data suggests
that the larger the picture, the more likely the user will purchase.

We've found that sites with similar product lines have dramatically different
success rates at this stage. That tells us that the design of the product pages
play a huge role in whether people continue or not.

5) The Checkout Stage

People reach this page when they add a product to their cart and start the
checkout process.

Almost everything that has been written about e-commerce usability focuses
on this stage. And, we see a lot of drop outs at this point  about 13%,
leaving 45 people to finish the checkout process successfully.

But, the most interesting thing is that the vast majority of dropouts here
come from two factors: required registration and poor shipping charge policies.

While we see usability problems at this stage, often manifesting themselves
as input errors in the myriad of data entry fields that users need to fill
out, we rarely see these problems causing users to abandon. Users seem content
to keep pounding away at the site until it finally relinquishes and processes
their purchase.

6) The Receipt and Acceptance Stage

When we first started looking at e-commerce, we thought after the user has
completed checkout, that everything was done.

We were shocked to find out that 11% of our users were so unhappy with a product
they received that they returned it. In many cases, they didn't receive the
product at all or it was the wrong product.

In a recent study, 8 out of 44 users told us they were unhappy with products
they purchased but didn't want the hassle of returning them.

Some shoppers told us they returned a product because it wasn't what they
expected. While these failures showed up in the Receipt stage, they are more
likely failures of the Product Evaluation Stage  the descriptions didn't
set the right expectations.

Out of our original 100 purchase-ready shoppers, only 34 people actually got
what they wanted.

As we learn more about the different stages and why users give up, we can
hone our craft while, simultaneously, increasing the success of our users and
our businesses. 